Samsung SSDs – IDF
We talked with Ryan Smith, senior manager for SSD product marketing at Samsung about the trends and drivers in the storage industry, when we were at IDF. The standard response was drives are getting bigger and faster.
In the enterprise or data center, storage selection is a function of read-write ratios, throughput, and latency. Some data centers need endurance, while others need high IOPS, and some are concerned about power consumption. There is no single solution for storage as some characteristics are mutually exclusive to other parameters, such as very large data volume and acceptable costs.
An example of one extreme is Google’s newest platform, with only small boot drives for storage, because latency is the biggest issue. Google determined that an all DDR3 memory array has lower 3-year operating costs than any other media. On the other end, Facebook uses mostly rotating storage with SSD cache, because capacity it the driver.
Most of the drives they ship have SATA interfaces, because the PCIe interfaces are still considered a niche product. The issue is the maturity and continued developments of the SATA interface as well as the large legacy installed base of SATA drives. PCIe, on the other hand, is fairly immature as a storage interface.
Drives are in the standard 2.5″ form factor for plug-in replacements and hot swap, and in mSATA for newer installations where the frames for the drives don’t exist. Mini-SATA is the same width as the connector, greatly reducing the size and weight of the drives. The roadmap for products mirrors the demand for capacity and speed, with on-going improvements in both areas. Flash enables new applications in computing and storage.
